What is DeMotte Campground?
DeMotte Park is a long, flat meadow in the spruce and fir on top of the Kaibab Plateau, the kind of place where elk stand in the fog at dawn, and the campground is tucked into the trees on its west edge beside SR 67, 7 miles before the Grand Canyon’s north entrance. It is 38 sites at about 8,800 feet, some of them tent-only, with tables, grills and fire rings, vault toilets and spigots of drinking water, and nothing else. It fits tents, trailers and small motorhomes; nothing has a hookup. Next door are the Kaibab Lodge and the North Rim Country Store, the only food and fuel between Jacob Lake and the rim.
Until 2025 DeMotte was the overflow for people who could not get into the park. The Dragon Bravo Fire changed the order of things: it burned the Grand Canyon Lodge and the North Rim’s water plant in July 2025, and in 2026 the park’s campground reopened without potable water, without campfires and with portable toilets. DeMotte has water, fire rings and real vaults, seven miles from the gate. In 2026 that makes it the first choice, not the fallback.
What you get is a cool, quiet forest camp with elk in the meadow and the canyon a 15-minute drive away. What you do not get is a canyon view from your site, a shower, a hookup or much chance of a walk-up site after lunch on a summer weekend.
How to camp DeMotte right
Reserve the minute the window opens. $30 a night; reserved sites carry a one-time $8 fee, and interagency passes get the usual camping discount. Half the sites are on recreation.gov (877-444-6777) six months out, half are first come, first served, sold on arrival by the host. Nineteen reservable sites is a very small number for late June to early October, and the other nineteen are gone by early afternoon on summer weekends. Season: May 15 to October 14, 2026. Fourteen-day limit, check-in and checkout at 2 p.m.
Get there. I-17 north to Flagstaff, US 89 north to Bitter Springs, US 89A across Navajo Bridge and up onto the plateau to Jacob Lake, then SR 67 south 25 miles. About 5 hours 35 minutes and 340 miles from Old Town, all paved. The signed campground road, Forest Road 616, is on the right just past the Kaibab Lodge turnoff. The drive down SR 67 passes through both green forest and the 2025 burn; the meadows in between are where the elk are.
Pick the season. Mid-September to early October is the best stretch: clear days, aspens turning, thinner crowds. July and August are cool and stormy, with thunder most afternoons in the monsoon. Frost is possible in any month, snow in May, June, September and October. SR 67 closes for the winter around December 1.
Water. Drinking water only, and limited: no tank fills, no dump station. The park has none in 2026, so bring every gallon you want for the rim. Nearest full services are at Jacob Lake, 25 miles north, and in Kanab or Page.
Camp by the rules. Bears are active: food, coolers and toiletries stay locked in the vehicle. Fire rings are usable unless the forest posts restrictions, which it often does by early summer. Pack for 30-degree nights in any month. The lodge dining room and the Country Store sell breakfast, gas and firewood, with shorter hours in October.
The rim in 2026. Bright Angel Point is closed this year, along with the Transept, Widforss and Uncle Jim trails, and the North Kaibab Trail is closed after the August 29, 2026 flood, so Cottonwood Campground below the rim is off the table. Cape Royal and Point Imperial are open. Clear, dry nights at 8,800 feet make the meadow one of the best stargazing spots in the state.
Dogs. Leashed in the campground and on the forest roads and trails around DeMotte Park; inside the park they are limited to the campground and the Bridle Trail.
Skip it if you cannot get a site and will not risk the walk-up line. Jacob Lake is 25 miles back, the forest roads off SR 67 allow free dispersed camping at least a half mile from the campground (the meadows along FR 22 and FR 610 are the local secret), and if you want the canyon at your tent door and can bring your own water, the North Rim Campground is open through October 15. For a canyon-edge forest camp with no facilities at all, Indian Hollow is down a long dirt road to the west.
The meadow Powell named and Roosevelt fenced
The Kaibab is Southern Paiute country, and the plateau’s name comes from their language. The Kaibab Band, whose reservation now lies around Pipe Spring at the plateau’s northwest foot (see the Kaibab Paiute RV Park), came up to these meadows in summer to hunt deer and gather, and went down to the warmer country before the snow. It was John Wesley Powell, the first to write the name Kaibab down, who gave the meadow its English one. In 1872, while his survey worked the plateau, he named it DeMotte Park for Harvey C. DeMotte, a Wesleyan mathematics professor who traveled with his party. It has also long been called VT Park, and some maps still use that name.
The federal government took an interest early. President Benjamin Harrison put the plateau’s forests into the Grand Canyon Forest Reserve in 1893, and on November 28, 1906, Theodore Roosevelt proclaimed the Grand Canyon National Game Preserve to protect what was called the finest deer herd in America. Protection meant removing what ate deer. Government hunters, the best known of them James “Uncle Jim” Owens, killed mountain lions, wolves, coyotes and bobcats by the hundreds and thousands over the next three decades. The Kaibab National Forest was created in 1908, and in 1919 the canyon became a national park, its boundary drawn seven miles south of this meadow.
What followed became a textbook case. With the predators gone and grazing still heavy, the deer multiplied past anything the plateau could feed; a federal release in 1924 counted upward of 30,000 deer, twice what the range could support, and by the late 1920s fawns were starving. The numbers have been argued over ever since, and ecologists still teach the Kaibab as the cautionary tale of wildlife management by subtraction. The mule deer are still here, in more sensible numbers, grazing the meadow at dusk.
The road made the meadow a stop. The highway now numbered SR 67 was built to the North Rim around 1926, and the Kaibab Lodge went up beside the meadow at about the same time, in the years when the Union Pacific was building its own lodge at Bright Angel Point. The Forest Service has not published when it built the campground on the meadow’s edge; it has been the National Forest’s answer to the park’s crowded rim campground for as long as anyone has written guides to the North Rim.
Then came 2025. The Dragon Bravo Fire, started by lightning on July 4, ran through the park’s forest and on July 12 destroyed the Grand Canyon Lodge, the visitor center and many historic cabins before it was done at more than 140,000 acres. DeMotte, the lodge and the store survived, and the campground reopened for 2026 as the most useful place to sleep near a rim that has lost most of what it had.
Why it matters
DeMotte Park is where the Grand Canyon story meets the national forest story, and the plateau is where both went wrong and got corrected in public. Powell named it, Roosevelt protected it, the government emptied it of predators, and the deer that resulted taught a generation of wildlife managers what not to do. Now a fire has rearranged the rim and handed a 38-site Forest Service campground the job the park used to do. For a Scottsdale camper the verdict is simple: it is a long day’s drive, the nights are cold, and in 2026 it is the best place to sleep near the North Rim, provided you book it six months ahead. Pair it with the rest of the day trips and long drives north of the Valley and go in September.